Intel has prolonged the life of its Haswell architecture surprisingly well - the first wave of Haswell CPUs arrived in mid-2013 and the second wave of Haswell-refresh CPUs arrived a year later. Close to two years of shelf-life for one microarchitecture is something we rarely see from Intel, a company that normally likes to abide by its fast-paced tick-tock development cycle.
The latest leak suggests Haswell will remain Intel's most current CPU until about April this year when the chip giant will be moving on to pastures new with the release of unlocked Broadwell-based CPUs, according to the latest roadmap. These CPUs advance power efficiency over current Haswell offerings by specifying 65W TDPs for unlocked quad-core models (QC). Intel then has another trick up its sleeve as it will release Skylake-S parts in the following quarter, Q3, just in time for Computex 2015.
The wave of new Broadwell CPUs in Q2 will be compatible with existing LGA1150 motherboards and are designed to prolong the life of the Z97 platform. The second release, Skylake-S in Q3, will introduce a new socket and chipset known as LGA1151 and 100-series, respectively. Interestingly, Skylake-S also includes fully-unlocked quad cores, but this time with the typical 95W TDP that we've come to expect from Intel enthusiast chips.
Both Broadwell and Skylake are fabricated from the same 14nm process node, although Skylake, obviously, is the most up-to-date CPU architecture of the duo. Both new CPUs being released in such a similar timeframe marks a new (enforced - ed) strategy from Intel, one where it will allow two different mainstream platforms to co-exist at the same time - LGA1150 with Haswell and Broadwell CPUs, LGA1151 with Skylake CPUs. That is in addition to its enthusiast platform, current based on the X99 chipset and Haswell-E CPUs, which is slated for an upgrade to Broadwell-E CPUs in Q1 of 2016.
